http://www.galleries-online.co.uk has been going for a few years mainly as a hobby for me to run in my spare time. As such I have not had much time or money to spend on properly marketing this online art gallery. I am now keen to become more proactive with this side of the website's development but only have a budget of £400 ($748) to fund marketing activities. It would be really helpful if someone could advice me about the most affective way of spending this limited budget to promote this website in a sustainable way. Thanks in advance
Why not partner with a university art department and feature work of the next graduating class? Wouldn't really cost you anything, and it's a great excuse not only for you to try to generate press yourself for supporting the arts and the community, but the school would likely get involved in the promotion as well. Jenn
Leveraging is your friend. Especially on limited budgets. Your best bet is to take your budget, and test out different areas that you either know of that work for sure, or have heard good things about, and keep tabs on it. Record all of the data. After 1-3 months of testing, take your actual budget and leverage it by spending X amount in all of those areas that have done the best for you. And by the best, I don't mean got the most amount of traffic, I mean got you the best conversions or generated you the most amount of money. Focus on those areas and just keep taking 20%-30% of your profits, and add them to your marketing budget. Slowly but surely you'll end up doing very well for yourself, and that's when you can take some of that budget and dabble in new unchartered areas of marketing. If you want to keep playing it safe, you can do that too, and just coast along making and working with what you know does the best. Personally, I've always seen the risk takers and the smart gamblers take their big chances after they've used the stuff that works for a while, and almost always come out on top. Also, if you lose some of it in a bad marketing investment, this way you're not back at square one, you still have stuff that works, and lots of cash to keep yourself steadily afloat. The joys of business.
Thanks for the useful tips both ion terms of managing the budget and the interesting idea regarding working with a university. I definaltey think web sites need to interact with the real world once in a while!
IMO Google Adwords is a great way to start, you can choose your budget and pretty much have control of everything to do w/ your ad. Good luck!
If you want a niche audience (in your case, it'd be art enthusiasts), I suggest you put up an even more interesting display of your website (which is beautiful by the way, but could be better), and use the Stumble Upon market to showcase your website to them. Stumble Upon is a free website-sharing social network. You can join and have your websites get visited by other people for free or you can pay 5 cents per visitor to determine how many visitors you want per day (you can have up to 2,000 per day). http://www.stumbleupon.com/create_campaign.php